Monday, January 2, 2017

ANFIELD RAP

This article first appeared on the pages of the Irish ExaminerAnd so the pain goes on for City at Anfield, the ground they just cannot function properly in.

A paralysis takes over, a numbness of the mind sets in, a deep-rooted fear takes a grip that is so all-pervading, that countless upgrades of manager, regime, and playing staff have changed absolutely nothing.

2003 - The last time

And so it was that City introduced Pep Guardiola to the Anfield rap sheet: two league wins here since 1956 and no sign of the this incredible tsunami of bad fortune and ill will being either slowed, stopped or turned around.

In fact in the first half it was simply more of the same. City playing with geriatric full backs against a side so energised that it looked like the first takes from yet another Keystone Cops movie.

"Throw in the Benny Hill theme tune and we were off. Liverpool’s high pressing, relentless approach to the match meant City had little or no time to move, think or breathe, during a first half that flowed in one direction only."

Once again, as had happened against Arsenal, the opposition’s first meaningful attack of the game brought a goal, a towering header from Georginio Wijnaldum.

However, you had to dissect its source and course to see how City, and one player in particular, had contributed.

With a ball played long up the left, Aleksander Kolarov produced a cushioned pass inside to nobody in particular.

This loose ball was picked up, carried and dispatched across the park in a matter of seconds to the marauding Adam Lallana, who ran at a bamboozled Pablo Zabaleta.

The Argentinian is a City stalwart and should not really be put through this final season of embarrassment, his legs getting slower and slower as the opposition get nippier and nippier.
Standing off Lallana to give a him a decent sight of the penalty area, Zabaleta watched in horror as the ball was played in for Wijnaldum to leap like a salmon and score. Underneath him, meanwhile, leaping like a fish attached to a rucksack full of bricks was Kolarov, the original culprit of lost possession.